From Lego Nexo Knight to My Little Pony: Compiling Birthday Wish Lists in Order to Explore Five- to Seven-Year-Old Children’s Brand Knowledge and Relationships with Brands Master Thesis Sanne Melis (s4207483) Supervisor: Dr. Csilla Horváth 2nd Examiner: Dr. Marcel van Birgelen Nijmegen, June 19th, 2017 Table of Content Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 3 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 4 Literature Review ......................................................................................................... 7 Children’s Brand Knowledge ........................................................................... 8 Children’s Relationships with Brands ............................................................. 11 Method ......................................................................................................................... 14 Results ......................................................................................................................... 18 Discussion and Conclusion.......................................................................................... 33 Propositions and Suggestions for Future Research .................................................... 37 Implications ................................................................................................................ 41 Limitations .................................................................................................................. 42 References ................................................................................................................... 43 Appendix .................................................................................................................... 46 Interview Guide Children................................................................................. 46 Interview Guide Parents.................................................................................. 49 Overview of Respondents ............................................................................... 52 2 1. Abstract The present study investigates children’s brand knowledge and their relationships with brands. As previous research has focused mainly on children who are eight years old and older, the present study focuses on children in the preoperational stage between five and seven years old. Extending a frequently used method to investigate a child’s brand awareness, I compiled wish lists with the participants for their birthday while conducting in-depth interviews. This method provided an indication of the children’s brand awareness and ability to recall brands, while at the same forming the basis for the exploration of children’s brand knowledge, their relationships with brands and other brand-related issues. Findings suggest that children between five and seven years old have a decent level of brand awareness and are able to recall brands that they have been confronted with in the past. Associations they have with the requested brands are varied, with non-product related attributes being mentioned by several of the participating children. Children in the preoperational stage do not yet appear to understand brand symbolism and do not yet appear to form self-brand connections with brands in order to express their self-identity. Children nowadays appear to be confronted with brands and advertising messages on multiple brand platforms, including brand-based movies on Netflix and brand-based games and videos on electronic devices such as iPads. Based on these findings I have developed propositions as well as suggestions for future research. Implications of these findings for managers, practice and society as well as limitations of the present study will be discussed. Key words: Children, Preoperational stage, Brand knowledge, Brand awareness, Brand recall, Brand associations, Brand symbolism, Self-brand connections 3 2. Introduction “(...) he refused to take the food with that [spoon] because (...) it was from Ikea and we also have a spoon from Hema (...) so he did manage to recognize that these two spoons were (...) very different retail brands and he said then that he didn’t want to take the Ikea spoon because that’s far away while Hema is in our village (...)” (mother of a five-year-old boy, #29). As illustrated by the opening quote, brands have a large impact on various aspects of people’s everyday life. In addition to extensive research on the effects of brands on adults, the impact of brands on children has attracted increasing interest among academics over the years. A brand can be operationalized as ‘the totality of perceptions and feelings that consumers have about any item identified by a brand name’ (Batra, Ahuvia & Bagozzi, 2012, p. 1). Investigating children’s brand knowledge and their relationships with brands is of interest as children represent three markets combined into one (McNeal, 1992). First, children represent an important primary market. Nowadays, children from western countries have money in the form of savings and allowances and can, from a relatively early age on, decide themselves on what they want to spend that money. Furthermore, children represent an important secondary market of influencers (McNeal, 1992; John, 1999). They considerably influence the purchases of their parents, not just in terms of everyday items such as food and toys, but they also influence decision-making processes regarding items such as cars, vacations and furniture (John, 1999). Additionally, children represent an important future market consisting of potential adult consumers. Research has shown that children develop brand loyalty when they are young, and positive brand attitudes are likely to remain once children have grown into adults (McNeal, 1992). Various studies have investigated the emergence of consumer behavior in children during early childhood (Haynes, Burts, Dukes & Cloud, 1993; McAlister and Cornwell, 2010). Being aware of brands that surround them is an important aspect of children’s emerging consumer behavior. Children as young as three years old have demonstrated levels of brand awareness (Arnas et al., 2016; Preston, 2016; McAlister & Cornwell, 2010). An interesting and commonly used method to investigate children’s brand awareness and brand recall is to analyze letters they have written to Santa requesting Christmas presents (Otnes, Kim & Kim, 1994a; Otnes, Kim & Kim, 1994b; Downs, 1983; O’Cass & Clarke, 2001; Richardson & Simpson, 1982). This method allows children to freely write down any brand they desire without restrictions, providing an adequate overview of the brands they have a 4 preference for and the brands that play an important role in their lives at a specific point in time. The studies applying this method however have focused purely on the letters that children wrote to Santa, analyzing the brands and the number of brands mentioned in the letters. Because the letters were collected from local post offices or retailers, the researchers did not have access to the children who authored the letters. Questions regarding the reasoning behind a specific request or associations children had with the brands they mentioned in their letters were not investigated into further detail. The aim of the present study is therefore to extend this research by conducting in-depth interviews while children are compiling a wish list containing gift requests. Conducting such interviews allows the exploration of children’s brand knowledge and their relationships with brands, as well as other brand-related issues. The present study focuses on children between five and seven years old. Following Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development (John, 1999), at this age children are in the preoperational stage. The preoperational stage, which includes children between three and seven years old, is one of the most relevant stages when exploring the development of brand symbolism in children (McAlister and Cornwell, 2010). During the preoperational stage children start to be able to recognize brand names and link them to product categories and display an emerging understanding of the symbolic meaning of brands (John, 1999). The preoperational stage can be divided into two subcategories (Stutts & Honeycutt, 1987; Neeley & Schumann, 2004). The second category is of interest for the present study. It is called intuitive thought and starts after children have turned four years old. In this sub-phase, children start to display the ability to categorize products based on similarities and differences as well as the ability to compare brands based on certain attributes (Neeley & Schumann, 2004). As the ability to differentiate between products as well as the ability to compare brands is important when exploring children’s relationships with brands, this study focuses on five to seven year old children in the second phase of the preoperational stage. Conducting exploratory research, analyzing children’s gift requests and conducting in- depth interviews allows the development of a more detailed understanding of children’s brand knowledge, including brand awareness and brand associations, and their relationships with brands, including brand symbolism and self-brand connections. This leads to the following research question: To what extent do five- to seven-year-old children develop brand knowledge and relationships with brands